The Contents - Of This Sack Would Have
Furnished A Modern Industrial Exhibition, Provisions Cooked And Raw,
Blankets, Maple-Sugar, Tinware, Clothing, Pork, Indian Meal, Flour,
Coffee, Tea, &C. Phelps Was The Ideal Guide:
He knew every foot of
the pathless forest; he knew all woodcraft, all the signs of the
weather, or, what is the same thing, how to make a Delphic prediction
about it.
He was fisherman and hunter, and had been the comrade of
sportsmen and explorers; and his enthusiasm for the beauty and
sublimity of the region, and for its untamable wildness, amounted to
a passion. He loved his profession; and yet it very soon appeared
that he exercised it with reluctance for those who had neither
ideality, nor love for the woods. Their presence was a profanation
amid the scenery he loved. To guide into his private and secret
haunts a party that had no appreciation of their loveliness disgusted
him. It was a waste of his time to conduct flippant young men and
giddy girls who made a noisy and irreverent lark of the expedition.
And, for their part, they did not appreciate the benefit of being
accompanied by a poet and a philosopher. They neither understood nor
valued his special knowledge and his shrewd observations: they didn't
even like his shrill voice; his quaint talk bored them. It was true
that, at this period, Phelps had lost something of the activity of
his youth; and the habit of contemplative sitting on a log and
talking increased with the infirmities induced by the hard life of
the woodsman.
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